That day it was Malcolm's first day of his junior year, as well as his first day at North Valley High. With his Amiga 9000 laptop in his satchel, he walked toward his classroom. He had read the timetable on the wall: the first two hours would be Information Technology. "This will be a breeze." he thought. In that moment, he was shoved aside by an older boy directed to the same classroom. Malcolm chose a desk in the front row, where he knew that nobody else wanted to stay, put his laptop on the desk and switched it on.
The IT teacher, a middle-aged woman with thick glasses, entered the classroom, closed the door and introduced herself. "My name is Ada Stone" she said, "but someone here already knows me. Right, Alan Grossberg?"
The students turned around to see who she was talking about. Sitting in the last row, with a stupid grin on his face, was the boy who pushed Malcolm before. Beside him sat two other students, who were laughing as if repeating a year was the funniest thing in the world.
After the rollcall, Mrs. Stone switched on the computer on the teacher's desk and the digital projector in the middle of the classroom, and started an introduction of the subject. "Most of you probably think that IT is only about playing with a computer" she said, "but that's not exactly the case. The games you play have been developed by somebody: to do the same, you must first learn the basics of writing a program. Does anybody know what a program is?"

It was ten minutes into the class, and Malcolm already wanted to be somewhere else. He was in kindergarten when he learned what a program was, and he was expecting a lecture about coding, not a patronizing speech treating the most basic concepts of IT as something magical and mysterious. He sighed.

Mrs. Stone continued her condescending talk. "Rule number 1 is to write software that is legible and easily maintainable. This is done with structured programming, and the language we will use to learn it is Pascal."
At that point, Malcolm raised his hand.
"Yes, what's the problem?" said Mrs. Stone.
"I don't work with Pascal." answered Malcolm. "The syntax is verbose, bitwise operations are a mess, loops have no escape clause, the 'case' construct is unusable, array and string operations are mutilated, there are no static variables, it breaks its own rules and it cripples the mind of whoever learns it. Teaching Pascal should be illegal."

The speech from Malcolm left Mrs. Stone at a loss for words for a moment. Then, convinced that he was just a smartass in need of a lesson, she decided for a sarcastic reply: "Well then, if you know other programming languages, why don't you come here and teach them to the class?"
Malcolm stood up from his desk and approached the teacher's desk. "Thank you" he said, in a completely serious tone. "I am fluent in C, C++, C Sharp, Java, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, MC68090 assembly, six dialects of BASIC and..."
"BACK TO YOUR DESK!" Mrs. Stone yelled. "I suppose you're good at writing software, so you will write a program that outputs all prime numbers between 2 and a given maximum, for tomorrow. Turn it in or you'll get an F. Am I clear enough?"
"Yes." Malcolm replied, and returned to his desk.

At his desk, Malcolm ran a text editor on his laptop and started writing code, in a rage-fueled frenzy. As the teacher was still talking about incredibly inane stuff, Malcolm raised his hand again.
"What is it now?" she asked.
"Could you please be quiet? I'm trying to work here." he replied.
"That work for tomorrow. Add a routine that calculates Pi to the same given maximum number of digits." said the teacher.
"As you wish." said Malcolm, and resumed his coding.

An hour later, Malcolm closed his laptop and stood up from his desk. "There. Finished." he said.
"Are you trying to say that you've done everything in an hour?" asked Mrs. Stone.
"No, I'm not trying. I'm actually saying it." Malcolm replied. "It's in a new directory in your computer." he added, pointing to the computer at the teacher's desk.
"How could you connect to my computer without the password?" she asked.
"But I know the password. It's 'password'." he answered.

The teacher reached her computer. Indeed, there was a new directory in the hard drive, named "Ada Stone's Worthless Attempt To Brainwash Malcolm Frink". Inside were an executable and a source code file. She opened the source file and noticed that it was written in a programming language she had never seen. The first lines looked like this:

n=eval[input["ENTER UPPER LIMIT: "]]
results=array[primes[n]]
primes[n]:=
{ / Initialize array
array=array[0 to n]
array§1=0
for i=2 to ceil[sqrt[n]]
if array§i!=0
for j=2*i to n step i
array§j=0
return select[array, { |x|x!=0 }]
}

The rest, which the comments identified as functions for 3D calculations, shared the same peculiar syntax.

"What is this? A joke?" the teacher started.
Malcolm approached her computer and saw what she was looking at. "That's Frink." he said. "It's a language my father invented. He named it after himself. As I said, I don't work with Pascal."
She ran the executable. Immediately, the desktop was replaced by a black screen with a white prompt reading:

ENTER UPPER LIMIT:

She entered a number and the prompt was replaced by a virtual environment: a series of concentric rings, each of them rotating in a different direction and speed, and each of them with a sphere mounted in its structure.

Seeing that the teacher was puzzled, Malcolm explained: "The radius of each of the rings represents a prime number. The radius of each of the spheres represents a digit of Pi. I did it this way because I am convinced that graphics really do matter."

Mrs. Stone was speechless.

"So, am I getting an A?" asked Malcolm.
"No, you're just avoiding the F." she said.

The rest of the morning passed with a Physics teacher who was unaware of the existence of quarks, an Electronics teacher who candidly admit she had a degree in Physics, knew next to nothing of Electronics and only accepted the teaching post because she and her boyfriend were broke, and a Biology teacher who dismissed the Chicxulub impact crater as "just a theory". This triggered an "intelligent falling" joke from Malcolm, which went completely over the teacher's head.

After the classes were over, Malcolm went to the bathroom. As he came out of the toilet, he saw Alan Grossberg blocking the exit door. "Where are you going, fag?" Grossberg asked.
"Home." replied Malcolm, matter-of-factly.
As he tried to walk past Grossberg, the older boy grabbed him by his shirt, saying: "You think you're smart, don't you, little faggot? Think you can outsmart this?" and punched him in his stomach. Malcolm fell down, gasping for air, but Grossberg grabbed him again, pulled him mere inches from his face and continued his taunt: "Mark my words, you piece of shit, one of these days I'm gonna bust a cap in your ass."
At that point, Malcolm did the only logical thing he could think of: he bit hard on the bully's nose. Grossberg, taken by surprise, let out a scream and let go of Malcolm, who shoved him aside and ran away. Meanwhile, Grossberg rinsed the blood off his nose under the tap and checked it in the mirror, to see how deep the bite marks were.